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Tuesday, May 30, 2017

We have a tendency to assume we’re morally superior to others

Alex Fradera

Alex Fradera, Psychologist

Originally published in The British Psychological Society

Our
tendency to see ourselves as better than average – already well-established in
psychology in relation to things like driving ability and attractiveness –
applies to our sense of our own morality, more strongly than it does to other
aspects of ourselves. And the new research shows just how irrational this
really is.

There
are some contexts where it makes sense to view your own qualities as unusual.
The most obvious is when you can make a clear comparison, such as knowing your
IQ is 140 and that the average is 100. The second, raised by study authors Ben
Tappin and Ryan McKay, is when you know you are strong on a trait, with no
reason to think that should be typical of others. If it strikes me one day that
I have a peculiar strength – say that I’m far better at observing canine hunger
than any other doggy state – it wouldn’t make sense to assume that everyone
else has this peculiar skill too.

But
in other contexts, it’s irrational to assume that our own skills are unusual.
Imagine I’m very kind and nurturing to kittens, much more so than I am to
cockroaches. Without a Kitten-Kindness psych-test score proving I’m objectively
superior, and knowing full well that most people have a fondness for softer,
non-vermin animals, then to presume I’m special in this area would be
irrational. It would make more sense to either drop my own self-rating, or
award high ratings on this trait to everyone. This balancing-out is called
social projection – if I do it, similar people probably do it as well.

The
question Tappin and McKay set out to test is whether we view our morality, as
compared with other traits, more like kitten cuddling or dog perception; that
is, whether we see our own moral virtues as special or if instead we socially
project and assume others are like us.

The
researchers recruited 270 participants from an online portal and asked them to
rate themselves and the average person on 30 traits, and to rate the
desirability of each one. A third of the traits related to the domain of
morality (e.g., honest, principled), a third sociability (warm, family
oriented) and a third agency (hard working, competent), and Tappin and McKay
computed how similar each participant was to the rest of the sample on each of
these domains. The more similar the participants rated themselves on these
different domains then, if they were being logical about it, the more they
should have socially projected and assumed that when they were high on a trait,
the average person would be too.

As a
rule, the participants engaged in social projection, which helped them to rate
others accurately. But in the morality domain, the participants should have
socially projected much more than they did. Instead, their ratings were
influenced by the desirability of the moral traits, meaning that participants
rated particularly prized traits like trustworthiness as 6.1 for themselves,
but only 4.3 for others. Traits like competence and warmth in the other domains
were also highly prized, but the participants didn’t inflate their scores here
in the same way. In short, we seem to be especially prone to seeing ourselves
as morally superior.

Sometimes
mismatches between ratings of self and others have a rational basis, but not
when it comes to our moral superiority, where we are led away from accuracy by
our desire to be a certain way. The researchers point out that it’s
particularly easy to make this kind of error when it comes to morality because
we aren’t privy to other people’s motivations, yet routinely rationalise our
own actions and lapses.

Since
the discovery of these kinds of “positivity illusions”, scholars have argued
that they prop up our wellbeing, but in this dataset, these irrational
enhancements of moral superiority were not associated with greater wellbeing or
self-esteem. Perhaps we expect that feeling morally superior will give us peace
of mind… but ultimately, it doesn’t deliver. Something to remind ourselves in
these trying political times.

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